Dear Old Dead(6)
“Take care of Michael, Eamon. As much as he’ll let you. God bless.”
The Archbishop hung up. Eamon Donleavy hung up, too, and stared through his still-open door at Charles van Straadt sitting across the hall. Charles van Straadt was still on the phone, talking to God knows who, doing only God knows what. No, Eamon thought, I don’t like him. I don’t trust him. I don’t want him slithering around on the edges of our lives.
If I were a man of courage, Eamon thought, I’d do something about him.
4
SISTER AUGUSTINE HAD BEEN seventeen years old on the day she entered her order, stubborn and exhilarated and panicked all at once. Those were the days when nuns wore tight white wimples fastened around their throats and so many skirts it felt like wading in water just to walk down a hall. Those were the days when Sisters barely spoke except to ask Sister Anne to pass the salt to Sister Josepha at breakfast. Those were also the days when nuns were never allowed to ask for anything for themselves. Sister Augustine remembered it all without regret. She was not a radical. She didn’t care if women were ever ordained into the priesthood or not. She felt no urge to think of God as a goddess or to call her Heavenly Father “She.” Sister Augustine simply preferred to spend her days in sweatsuits and sneakers rather than habits and nun shoes. She also preferred to be called “Augie.” Sister Augustine had been born Edith Marie Corcoran, which she hated. She had been named “Mary Augustine” by the Mother Superior of her order on the day she received its habit. She had first been called “Augie” here, about ten years ago, by one of the girl junkies in the refuge program. The street kids all thought she was cute. It annoyed her sometimes. She tried not to show it.
Sister Augustine regretted nothing of the passing of the old order after Vatican II, except this: Before the changes, there always seemed to be hundreds of people milling around, willing to do everything and anything and willing to do it for free. That wasn’t true, of course, not really. Augie knew her own selective memory when she caught it in the act. Even so. Her order used to run two dozen elementary schools, paid for by their parishes and provided to parishioners for free. These days, with no nuns to speak of and lay teachers having to be paid just like public school teachers and provided with benefits besides, it was a miracle if a parish school’s tuition wasn’t just as high as the tuition of the fancy private school down the road. And then there were the hospitals…
Sister Augustine looked out the window of the emergency-room nurses’ station at the man with his cardboard sign walking back and forth on the sidewalk outside and shook her head. In a minute she would have to go out there again, where all hell was breaking loose. In a minute she would have to pretend she was competent and wise and no more prone to hysteria than anybody else. For just this second she could contemplate the center’s most faithful protester and wonder to herself what had happened to all the nuns. Even if the habits had disappeared and church discipline had been relaxed—why should that make a difference? Doing good was doing good, no matter how you justified it to yourself. Doing good didn’t become less important than climbing the corporate ladder to vice president in charge of operations for IBM just because the Mass was being said in English.
The door to the nurses’ station opened. Augie turned around to see Sister Kenna Franks coming in with a large tray of cafeteria food. Sister Kenna Franks was a Franciscan from an order in Boston, an order that, like Augie’s own, had almost no nuns left in it. Back in the old days, Augie might have been assigned to a place like the Sojourner Truth Health Center, but the Sisters under her direction would all have been Sisters in her own habit. These days, they took any nun whose order was willing to sponsor her for a year or two, they took nuns the way they took acts of charity from rich old men whose anti-Papism was only just beneath the surface. Augie had quite a lot of nuns on her staff. She had many more nuns than any other Catholic medical facility in the city. Only one of them was a nun of her own order.
Sister Kenna Franks wore a loose black cowl-necked robe tied at the waist with a rope. It fell to her feet and covered up the fact that she was wearing socks and sandals. Sister Kenna Franks was very young and very thin and never ate much of anything at all. She put the cafeteria tray down on the desk and cocked her head.
“We figured you were hiding out,” she said. “Is there something interesting going on out there on the sidewalk?”
“What’s his name with the sign,” Augie told her.
Sister Kenna Franks went to the window and looked. “Oh, him. The others are gone, you know. The ones from that group that wants civil rights for homosexuals. Sister Victoria said this morning at breakfast that that was because of all the stories in the newspapers.”